The Zone

A state of being in which one is focused on the activity at hand to the exclusion of all other unnecessary sensory input. When you are in The Zone, you are most likely performing at your best. The Zone is kind of like The Flame and the Void in The Wheel of Time.

For a musician, being in The Zone means being one with the music and with the instrument. You _are_ the music. You feel every vibration, you hear every nuance, you fit perfectly with everything. It is sheer aesthetic pleasure, aural bliss, and transcendental state all in one. Words cannot fully describe it. You must listen to the music.

Once, while working on a huge C++ project, I sat down at a terminal after dinner and put some bubble yum bubble gum in my mouth. It was grape flavored. I began chewing, and also began writing code.

At about 10 am the next morning I regained consciousness. It seems I had entered the zone. I don't really remember how the 14 hours I spent in the zone passed, but somehow I had a few thousand lines of code written and debugged, almost all the functionality of my project was implemented, and now the sun was up. My fingertips were a little numb, I felt like I had blanked out, and at about this point in time I remembered I had been chewing gum.

I wondered what happened to my gum, and then realized there was this mush in my mouth. The gum had lost all its properties of cohesion, having instead the same texture as a shredded wad of wet toilet paper. I tried to spit the nasty goo out, but that didn't work. I even tried to scrape the junk out of my mouth, and tried to rinse it out with water. It was a nightmare!

The Zone n. a state of mind experienced while riding. You don't think, you just do. A truly mystical experience that can't be fully explained, but when you get there you'll know it and strive to reach it again.

From the Dictionary of Mountain Bike Slang